@bookstodon I suspect that the audience for this book is "people who are looking for different structures and styles." That is me to a "T." So, I really enjoyed DAYSWORK by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel.
Dayswork was so much fun to read, especially that veritable feast of fun facts. What did Herman Melville have to say about American critics? What did Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian have to say about Melville? How many species go through menopause, and of those, how many of them are whales? What was the name of the dog in Jane Eyre, and which famous poet adopted that name for their own dog? (The name of Byron's dog is also mentioned, and surprisingly it is a nautical term, and not say, Canem Arrogantis.)
The entire novel is a kind of celebration of absurdity: the learned husband and wife who are both writers and seem to compete for who is most clever and witty, the early pandemic which creates a whole new way of doing everything while stuck in place, the research conducted by the wife who wants to write a book about Melville, the intimate bromance between Hawthorne and Melville, and even perhaps the quest to write a book about Melville in the first place. (Can a book about Melville be its own White Whale?)
The MC, as she dives deeper into her quest to write a book about Melville, discovers that there seem to be more things that cannot be quantified than there are things that can be measured. How shall we measure the patience of Melville's family or of Hawthorne's? What is the correct measure of confidence, or ambition, or even a dayswork, or the precarious state of marriage during already trying times (what the wife compares to "temporal disintegration.")
We begin to see that the (unnamed) wife/narrator is beginning to connect the looseness of pandemic time, the looseness of Melville's fantasies, and the erosion of her own marriage. Her husband seems less solid to her, as if he were there, but not really there, like a remote Zoom call husband.
Melville teaches the writer who would write about him, that fate isn't something that happens to us. Rather, we are fate. We are destiny. Therefore, in order to escape fate, we would have to escape ourselves, which seems a little dark, and about as possible as defeating the sea. Or a global pandemic. Or a marriage which is becoming a ghost of itself.
The writer makes a slew of unparalleled parallels. It is rather stunning. Nothing is mentioned that means nothing. The delving into other poet's and writer's lives is fascinating, especially the tumultuous relationship of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
Just as Melville tried to use the entire dictionary to express something about life itself, the writer tries to interpret her own life through writers and language.
The reader has to extrapolate the writer's reflections on her own marriage, since she only hints at her conclusions via comparison. Certainly the couple is intellectually engaged. They respect each other and listen to each other, but they seem to share knowledge over intimacy. Even smart people can be unaware that they are becoming unmoored and are drifting.
I found this novel to be whipsmart and engaging, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.
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